Ground and buildings

Structures and objects

The Structures & objects section of the inventory has nearly 300 models from every level, in 16 categories: fences and walls, security and military, towers, industrial, underground, vehicles, furniture and more. Each category shows how many there are, and how many this level already has.

Hover a category and its list opens beside the panel, each entry with its picture from above and a 3D card. Click the category, or Pin, to keep the list open. Typing in the inventory's search box lists every match instead.

Towers, masts and radar, from every level

A model the level does not have is marked import. When you apply, the studio copies it in from the level that has it, with its parts and textures. Where the level already has a texture of the same name with another picture, the model gets a copy of its own, so it looks as it does in its own level.

Placing a building

Pick it, and a see-through preview follows the pointer at its true size. The preview tells you whether it can stand there:

Preview	When	A click
Green, level ground	The ground under it varies less than 1 m	places it
Amber, uneven	1 to 3 m	places it, sunk into the slope
Red, too steep	more than 3 m	is refused
Red, overlaps	it runs into another building or a tall prop	is refused

Alt+click places a refused building anyway. With a building in hand the map is tinted where it would not fit: yellow for uneven, red for too steep. B shows the same tint without one.

Everything you place on the ground gets the ground under it levelled when the mission is built, the way the game's level designers did it: buildings, fences, walls, gates and crates, placed by hand or by an agent. The ground under each is set to one height and smoothed for 5 m round it, and what stands within 5 m of each other shares that height, so a fence runs straight and a gate meets level. A dashed apron on the map marks it. Level the ground under it in its panel switches this off for that one.

What comes with a building

A building of the game's comes with what the game gives it, copied from a real copy of it in the levels: its doors, its lift, and the things that stand inside it (desks, filing cabinets, lamps, beds, crates, barrels). The underground security building brings its cell doors, its metal door and its beds. A message says what came: Guard HQ placed with its own 18 doors, a lift and 53 things inside.

Each of them is an ordinary placement of yours: move it, take it out, or keep it. Move, turn or settle the building and its own doors, lift and furniture go with it. One you move on its own stays where you put it, in the game too, and goes on going with the building from there.

Only real buildings come with anything. A fence panel, a wall, a gate, a crate, a pole, a lamp, a sign or a vehicle is placed on its own.

• Doors open in the game, as the game's own do: walk up to one and the prompt comes. Each leaf slides the way it does in that building's doorway. A door model placed from the inventory opens too, on any floor of a building.
• A lift runs between its floors, with a call button at every floor and one inside the cabin. Its doors belong to it: locked to the player, they open when the cabin reaches their floor and shut when a button is pressed. Lift and Ekks HQLift in the inventory put a lift shaft anywhere.
• A gate in a fence. Put on a fence line of yours, a gate takes out the panels in its way and fills the fence up to each post.
• A gate is a whole gateway. Placing one lays both leaves, the switch on the post that opens them, and a fence panel in line on each side, so a run of fence carries straight on. Hold Alt while placing it for a single leaf, which the player opens like a door.
• A gate on its own, beside it in the inventory, is both leaves and their switch with no fence panels, for a gap you have already walled.
• Closes by itself, or stays open. Select a door or gate of yours: its panel says how it opens, and Closes by itself sets whether it shuts again after so many seconds or, once open, stays open. Both leaves of a gate change together.

Buildings that open the ground

A building with a cellar or a lift shaft needs the ground taken away over it, and the game does that only in whole 16 m squares, on a grid of its own. So such a building stands on the game's 16 m ground grid, as the game's own copies of it do: placing it lands it there, dragging moves it freely and settles it onto the grid when you let go, and moving it or turning it a quarter turn keeps it there. It never moves more than 8 m each way to sit on the grid. Turned any other way, it cannot sit on the grid: the ground is still opened so the cellar can be walked into, but the soil over it is drawn, and the check list says so.

A mission made before 1.0.5 has such buildings moved onto the grid once, as it opens: a banner says which and how far, and undo takes it back. Apply opens the ground exactly where the game would, and the 3D close-up shows the same openings.

Fences and walls

Fences and walls chain: each click adds a panel that starts where the last one ended and points at the pointer, in 15° steps (Alt for any angle). A new run snaps onto the end of a fence nearby. C starts a new run. Panels meet exactly, with no gap between them in the game.

For a long run, press and drag: the run starts where you press, and panels are laid one after another along the drag, pointing the way it goes, for as long as you keep going. Undo takes back the whole run. Press near the end of a run to carry it on.

A fenced compound

Right-click open ground and choose Build a fenced compound here...: a chain-link fence or a masonry wall round a rectangle you size, a gate on the side facing the player's start (two sliding leaves and a switch to open them), a floodlight, watchtowers, and up to four guards inside, looking out. The ground under it is levelled. It is made of your own pieces, selected as one group, so you can move it, turn it, or change any part.

Groups, copy and paste

• Select a group: drag a box with the right mouse button: it selects everything you can move inside it, yours and the level's, without opening the menu (hold Shift to add to what is selected). Or Shift+drag a box round your things (hold Alt too for the level's), or Shift+click to add or drop one. Ctrl+A selects all your changes.
• Right-click the group (one of them, or the area they cover) for what to do with all of them: rotate, drop onto the ground, duplicate, copy, add to your items, zoom to them, deselect, or remove them all.
• Work on it: drag any member to move them all. Arrows nudge it, R and T turn it about its centre, G sets it on the ground, Ctrl+D duplicates it, Delete removes it.
• Copy and paste: Ctrl+C, then Ctrl+V at the pointer, in this mission or any other, on any level.
• Keep... keeps it in the inventory, under Your items (below).

Your items

Anything you like in a mission can be kept, to place again in any mission, on any level: a building, a guard with his weapon and sight, a weapon, a camera, or a whole area such as a compound with its fence, towers and guards, kept as one item. It can be yours, or the level's own, even in one of the original missions.

1. Select it (one thing, or a group with Shift+drag).
2. Press Add to your items... in its panel (Keep... for a group).
3. Give it a name and a category: Areas & compounds, Buildings, Characters, Objects & props, Weapons & items or Cameras & alarms. The studio suggests one from what it is.

Your items are at the top of the inventory, each category a row whose list opens beside the panel, as the structures' do. Pick one, turn it with R, and click to put it down.

• A building keeps what came with it: a building of yours its doors, lift and furniture; one of the level's comes back with the doors, lift and furniture the game gives it.
• Its guards keep their walkways: the walkways of the area come with it, and its guards walk their patrols on them wherever you paste it. The studio joins them to your map's walkways round the area's walls and through its gates, and to the doorways of its buildings, so the guards inside can walk out. A guard left with no walkway where he stands is put on the nearest one.
• It stands as it stood: a building with a cellar lands on the game's ground grid (the paste moves a few metres to get there), and everything keeps how deep in the ground it stood.
• Its cameras raise an alarm: pasted into a mission with no alarm system (an empty map has none), the area brings one, and its guards answer it.
• An area of a level's keeps what makes it work: its gates and doors work as they do in the original mission (Mission 8's radar gate opens from its keypad once the lock is picked, and stays open), the switches they open work, its cameras and alarm buttons join your mission's nearest alarm, and what was mounted above the ground, like a switch on a gate post, stays at its height. The player's start and the machine guns stay behind.
• Its ⋮ (or a right-click) edits its name and description, moves it to another category, or deletes it from the inventory. Missions it was placed in keep their copies.
• Hover it to see it in 3D: an area shows whole, its fence, gate, towers, buildings and guards where they stand, with how much ground it covers.
• What you keep from the AI designer's Workshop is here too.

Tabs

The button beside the inventory's search box shows it as tabs: Your items, Characters, Weapons and Structures along the top, one at a time taking the whole panel. Press it again for sections.

Shaping the ground

The Ground bar on the right of the map has the tools. Each opens its panel beside the bar.

The Ground bar, and the Level tool's panel with the areas shaped so far

Tool	What it does	How
Level	Flattens an area at one height	Drag a rectangle, or click for a 12 m patch
Raise, Lower	Lifts or sinks an area by so many metres	Drag; Round for an ellipse
Smooth	Evens out bumps, keeping the lie of the land	Drag
Ramp	An even slope between two heights	Drag from the bottom of the slope to the top
Remove	Takes a hill or a mountain away: the ground round it is drawn in across it	Drag round it
Brush	Shapes the ground freehand, and stamps mountains, hills and valleys	Hold the button and drag, or click (below)
Paint	Changes what the ground is made of	Pick a material and drag

• Every shaped area is a card in the panel: Go there, See it in 3D, Remove it. Drag an area on the map to move it; its card has its size, turn, shape and edge.
• Every number in the panel has a slider, and the map follows as you drag it. The number stays beside it for an exact value. Clear the Edge box, or press Automatic edge, to let the studio choose it again.
• The edge eases the new ground into the old, wider the bigger the change, so an area reads as land, not as a drawn shape.
• Areas apply in order, each on the ground the ones before it left. The contour lines, the relief and every height in the studio follow at once.
• Nothing is left floating. The ground never changes under something standing on it: buildings, walls, crates, vehicles and pickups keep their ground. The panel and the check list say what is in the way, so you can move it first. Guards' walkways move up and down with the ground, and the player start is set down on it.
• The panel lists what you have shaped since the last Apply; what is already in the game folds away (Show them brings it back).

The brush and the big shapes

Brush has two rows of tools:

• Raise, Lower, Smooth, Flatten (to the height where the stroke began), Roughen and Erase, with a size up to 600 m, a strength, and a soft, even or hard edge. Up to a size of 10 m it paints fine 1 m detail; bigger, it shapes the terrain itself.
• Shapes: Mountains (a click puts one down, a drag lays a range), Hills, Plateau (a flat top on steep sides), Crater and Valley (carved along the stroke). Each comes in Small, Mid and High (a mountain from 25 m high to 160 m), or type your own radius and height, with Rough for how craggy it is. No two come out the same, and overlapping mountains keep the higher one, so a range does not pile up.

As high as you like

There is no height limit. The game's height maps move its ground only about 4 m either way, so where you shape it further than that, Apply builds the level's terrain itself again there, meeting the rest of the level exactly. The level's baked light and shade are redone over the changed ground: a new mountain has a lit side and a shaded side, and one you took away leaves no shadow behind.

The game holds a fixed amount of terrain, and the Terrain bar at the top of the Ground panel shows how much of it the mission uses. Flat ground is cheap; steep new ground is not. The check list warns past 90 %, and a mission that needs more than the game holds is stopped before Apply, with a note to make the biggest shapes smaller or fewer.

Painting the ground

Paint: the level's own materials

Paint changes what the ground is made of: pick one of the level's own materials (grass, dirt, rock, snow, as the level has them), set the size, and drag over the map. Erase takes paint off. Hover a material to see that ground in the level's own texture.

Textures

Select anything with a model and open Textures in its panel: the pictures it is drawn with, as the game has them.

• Replace takes a PNG of yours, up to 2048 × 2048, and that texture becomes the mission's own, marked yours. Change swaps it for another; Back gives the level's picture back.
• It changes that texture wherever the level uses it, not only on the thing you selected: the level's models share their textures.
• It is kept with the mission like any other change (undo works), and written into the mission's slot when you apply. The game's own files are not touched, and a picture you take off comes back as the level's own on the next Apply.

Next: the 3D close-up.